They stepped around the lizard carving like it might do harm. On impulse, Finch went back and stooped with a muttered curse. Picked it up. As Bosun had no doubt intended him to do from the beginning.

Followed Bosun into the darkness.

Once, Finch’s father had shown him an old tobacco pipe. “This pipe contains the world,” he said. Finch might’ve been fourteen, still running errands like a loyal son. His father was ten years removed from the campaigns against the Kalif, and rising fast within House Hoegbotton. They sat at his ornate desk in the study of the old house. Dad on his soft red silk chair. Finch on a stool to his left. Souvenirs his father had brought back from the desert served as grace notes. A rifle used by the Kalif’s men. The steering wheel from a tank. A scimitar that he had promised would one day be his son’s.

A sunny spring morning, mottled shadow coming into the room from the long bank of windows against the far wall. Faint honey smell from the tiny white flowers that came with the manicured bushes that lined the avenue in front of the house.

“A pipe?” Finch said. Incredulous. Expecting a trick. Maybe a magic trick.

His father pointed to a hole in the side of the pipe. “Look inside.”

Warily, Finch put the pipe to his eye. Gasped in delight. Because the glass magnified the image revealed through the hole. And the world did indeed exist there. A whole map of the known world. There was a dot for Ambergris. The line of the River Moth. The city of Morrow marked to the north, Stockton some fifty miles south, on the other side of the river. The Southern Isles down below the Moth Delta. The Kalif’s empire covering the whole west beyond the Moth. Exotic city after city marked in that vast desert, the plains and hills beyond. To the east, jungle and mountains that remained uncharted.

“There’s a hole on the other side, too,” his father said.

Finch turned the pipe around. Stared into another tiny piece of magnifying glass. Black-and-white photos of twelve men and women confronted him.

“Who are they?”

“Spies,” his father said. “The owner of this pipe ran a network of spies. The map on the other side is really a code. It tells the owner something about the spies whose pictures you’re looking at. Each one lives in a different city marked on the map. But you have to know the code to know which goes with which city. And what other information is being given to you.”

Finch took his eye away from the pipe to look at his dad. “How fun!” he said, because he didn’t know what to say.